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'Puritanical' Americans

Updated Sept. 15, 1998 12:01 a.m. ET

As the rest of the world is now forced to grapple with hard evidence of U.S. President Bill Clinton's wrongdoing, two reactions tend to stand out. The first is to ridicule American morals, as if any activity relating to the genitals somehow deserves privacy. The French daily Le Monde, for example, in an editorial titled "Hell Is American," called Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation a "new McCarthyism." Italy's La Repubblica called the American people "infantile." "If this is the hierarchy of values that inspire the American people," it editorialized, "America...